doing. The curtains are drawn, the lamp is lighted and veiled
into exquisite soft shadowiness. All the world is far off.
All its din and dole strike into the bank of darkness that
envelops you and are lost to your tranced sense. In all the
world are only your friend and you, and then you strike out
your oars, silver-sounding, into the shoreless night.

But the night comes to an end, you say. No, it does not. It
is you that come to an end. You grow sleepy, clod that you
are. But as you don't think, when you begin, that you ever
shall grow sleepy, it is just the same as if you never did.
For you have no foreshadow of an inevitable termination to your
rapture, and so practically your night has no limit. It is
fastened at one end to the sunset, but the other end floats off
into eternity. And there really is no abrupt termination. You
roll down the inclined plane of your social happiness into the
bosom of another happiness,--sleep. Sleep for the sleepy is
bliss just as truly as society to the lonely. What in the
distance would have seemed Purgatory, once reached, is
Paradise, and your happiness is continuous. Just as it is in
mending. Short-sighted, superficial, unreflecting people have
a way--which in time fossilizes into a principle--of mending
everything as soon as it comes up from the wash,--a very
unthrifty, uneconomical habit, if you use the words thrift and
economy in the only way in which they ought to be used, namely,
as applied to what is worth economizing. Time, happiness,
life, these are the only things to be thrifty about. But I see
people working and worrying over quince-marmalade and tucked
petticoats and embroidered chair-covers, things that perish
with the using and leave the user worse than they found him.